Mia Bay

Mia Bay is an American historian and currently the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania.^[1] She studies American and African-American intellectual and cultural history and is the author of, among others, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925^[2] and To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells.^[3]

Life and career

Bay earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993 and is a professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania.^[4] She has taught at Rutgers University where she also served as co-director of the Black Atlantic Seminar at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis^[5] and is a member of the Organization of American Historians.^[6] She was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 2022 for Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance.^[7]

Works

• The Ambidexter Philosopher: Thomas Jefferson in Free Black Thought, 1776-1877 (forthcoming)
• Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021.^[8]
• Race and Retail: Consumption across the Color Line. Rutgers Studies on Race and Ethnicity, 2015. (Editor, Contributor).^[9]
• Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans, with Documents. Co-authored with Deborah Gray White and Waldo Martin, Bedford Books, St. Martin’s, 2012.^[10]
• To Tell the Truth Freely: the Life of Ida B. Wells. Hill & Wang, 2009.^{[11][12][13][14][15][16]}
• The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.^[17]